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Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

It's not merely smaller volume: it's got no fundamentals whatsoever. It is the purest incarnation of "the value is what people will pay for it."

Own stocks? If the company tanks, they still have assets to liquidate.

Own foreign currencies? People still have to pay their taxes in those, so there's always some market for them.

Own Bitcoin? Once people stop believing it'll go to the moon, there's no reason to own it for 99.9% of people (and the reasons the remaining 0.1% want it are antithetical to a functioning and economically healthy society).

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Wanting to sidestep banks when doing business is antithetical to a functioning and economically healthy society?

Fourteen years ago a good deal of those banks crashed the world economy but are still around because governments decided that their immense loses had to be socialized using taxpayer money. Not my definition of economical healthy.

Before the advent of altcoins and before the fees skyrocketed people were using BTC to pay for stuff. A network that can facilitate this has value. What that value is is a matter of debate, just like it's debatable whether Tesla should be worth ten times as much as Volkswagen.

Any crypto that survives in the long term and will facilitate near-instant global payments at minuscule costs without middlemen will have enough value for a lot of people to want to have it.

When some of the systems that keep our society functioning smoothly are becoming damaged or corrupted, the correct response is not to throw the whole thing out and say "we're the tech world, we're really smart; we can just create our own systems that don't have to interact with governments in any way, and do it better than they did! (Plus, since we're the ones on the ground floor/running the show, we can make a boatload of money for ourselves!)"

Because the result of that is entirely predictable, and has, in fact, been playing out over the last few years, with the crypto world, as many people have described, "learning 200 years' worth of lessons in how economies and finance really work compressed into a decade."

No; the right answer is to take up our collective responsibility and work together to fix those systems so they serve everyone again (or possibly for the first time; YMMV), rather than replacing one elite with another.

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